National Jazz Museum September 2011 Schedule

For a combination of jazz dialogue, education, and live performance, look no further than the National Jazz Museum in September.

Our flagship conversation series, Harlem Speaks, first features soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom in our first of several Harlem Speaks @ The New School events, which will occur in Greenwich Village (details below). Next, elder master Jimmy Heath will regale the live audience at our Visitor’s Center with tales from his illustrious history as a jazz artist.

Our Jazz for Curious Listeners series focuses on four classic recordings—Kind of Blue, Art Tatum: Solo Masterpieces, Red Clay, and Jazz at Massey Hall. The monthly Saturday panel peers into the legacy of jazz at Carnegie Hall.

We launch a new series this month, Tune Talk. We’ll find out where our favorite jazz songs come from and how they evolve into standards. This month’s featured song: “Body and Soul.” Last but not least, our collaborative series with the Rubin Museum of Art—Harlem in the Himalayas—features alto saxophonist David Binney’s quartet and some special guests. Mark your calendars, and bring some friends to share in pleasurable listening and learning!

Whether you’re new to jazz, or a seasoned listener, you’ll appreciate this session on the best-selling jazz recording of all time. Recorded and released in 1959, leader Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue has stood the test of time as a jazz classic.

Why? Is it the fact that the ensemble played a “modal” approach instead of a string of chord changes as was prominent in the bebop style? Is it the fact that legendary artists participated: trumpeter Davis, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb? Was it songs such as “So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” and “All Blues”? All of the above?

Soprano saxophonist/composer Jane Ira Bloom has been full-time faculty at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music since 1989, and holds degrees from Yale University and Yale School of Music. She is a pioneer in the use of live electronics and movement in jazz and winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition, the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Award for lifetime service to jazz, Downbeat International Critics Poll & Jazz Journalists Award for soprano saxophone, the IWJ Jazz Masters Award, and the Charlie Parker Fellowship for jazz innovation. Bloom also has an asteroid named in her honor by the International Astronomical Union (asteroid 6083janeirabloom).

Her compositions and commissions include the American Composers Orchestra, St. Luke¹s Chamber Ensemble, Pilobolus & Paradigm Dance Companies, NY City Center's Fall for Dance Festival, and the NASA Art Program. She has also produced and recorded for CBS, ENJA, JMT, Arabesque Jazz Recordings and Artistshare. Bloom has been presented in the most prestigious halls, clubs, and festivals around the world, and a new event in Brooklyn, NY featuring cutting edge woman artists was named in her honor (the 2009 Bloom Festival).

Back after sold out shows in years past, acclaimed and highly individual saxophonist/composer David Binney is one of the most prolific jazz musicians on the scene today. David's distinctive saxophone sound and innovative compositions have been heard from basement clubs in New York to jazz festivals in Europe.

In addition to David's extensive work as a leader, he has also been sought after as a sideman, appearing on recordings with Medeski, Martin & Wood and Uri Caine's Mahler Project. He has produced all of his own albums in addition to two Lost Tribe releases. David started his record label, Mythology Records, in 1998.

Starting with Benny Goodman’s historic 1938 concert, Carnegie Hall has hosted jazz concerts that gained classic status when they were issued on commercial recordings. Join us for an afternoon of superlative music courtesy of Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and others.

Trumpet icon Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay marks a transitional moment in his career, in which he had been playing a form of straight-ahead jazz that some called “hard bop” on the Blue Note label. Red Clay incorporated electronic instrumentation (played on keyboard by Herbie Hancock, and bass by Ron Carter) and tapped into soul/funk styling. This was also the first recording on Creed Taylor’s CTI label, a forerunner of what came to be called “fusion jazz.”

Come to hear the various streams of style identified and made crystal clear, as this recording is placed within the historical context of Hubbard’s career as well as the stylistic direction of the music.

A key reason why“Body and Soul” is considered a classic is the very famous rendition by Coleman Hawkins in 1939. As a rite of passage, professional tenor saxophonists everywhere learned that solo. But is one famous version of a song enough to make it an enduring classic?

Or, in this case, do superlative versions by the Benny Goodman Trio, and Chu Berry and Roy Eldridge before Hawkins’, plus re-workings by John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon and others add to the aura of legend?

Tenor saxophonist and museum executive director Loren Schoenberg will go deep into the archives tonight, so join the journey!

In what turned out to be their last recording together, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker performed in Canada at Massey Hall on May 15, 1953 in a show marketed as “the greatest jazz concert ever.” The two primary founders of the bebop movement were joined by drummer Max Roach, bassist Charles Mingus, and pianist Bud Powell.

This concert was indeed a great affair in which they performed songs by Gillespie (“Salt Peanuts,” “A Night In Tunisia”), Thelonious Monk (“52nd Street Theme”), Tadd Dameron (“Hot House”), Juan Tizol (“Perdido”), Jerome Kern (“All the Things You Are”), among others. Come feed your ears with the thrilling sounds and your minds with the keen analysis of Loren Schoenberg.

Long recognized as a brilliant instrumentalist, Heath is also a magnificent composer and arranger. He has performed with nearly all the jazz greats of the last 50 years, from Howard McGhee, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis to Wynton Marsalis. For the past 30 or so years, Heath performed regularly with his brothers, Percy and Albert, as the Heath Brothers, a band that often included contributions from his son Mtume, a noted percussionist, composer, and rhythm-and-blues producer. During his career, Heath has performed on more than 100 albums. He has written more than 125 compositions, many of which have become jazz standards and have been recorded by artists such as Art Farmer, Cannonball Adderley, Clark Terry, Chet Baker, Miles Davis, James Moody, Milt Jackson, Ahmad Jamal, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, J.J. Johnson, and Dexter Gordon. Heath has also composed extended works, premiering his first symphonic work "Three Ears" in 1988 at Queens College (CUNY) with Maurice Peress conducting. Heath retired from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College in 1998, where he served as a Professor of Music for more than 11 years. Still, he maintains an extensive performance schedule and continues to conduct workshops and clinics throughout the United States, Europe, and Canada. He holds honorary degrees from Sojourner-Douglass College and the Juilliard School, and has a chair endowed in his name at Queens College. Currently, he serves on the board of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In January 2010, his long-awaited life story, I Walked With Giants, was published by Temple University Press.